September 22, 1953: Hey, goodnight kid!

Schroeder's awesome. (Although it does look a bit like his piano has an oversized hood ornament.)

September 11, 1953: Turn your head, Ludwig

I'm rather fond of this one. It's a good example of an idea you simply don't see in other comic strips. What is it about it that makes it possible for Peanuts, but not other comics?

This expression is similar to a chagrimace, but it's subtly different. Charlie Brown's emotion is of amusement, not dismay.

August 11, 1953: Schroeder and Snoopy

I'm at one of those points again where I feel like I need to link every strip. It's because this is such a formative period in Peanuts history. Many of the things we've seen frequently in later strips and compilations got their start in this period.

Here, it's the team of Schroeder and Snoopy. Snoopy works well with many characters, but Schroeder most teams only with him or Lucy. Up to this point we've also seen him and Charlie Brown in the strips where Charlie Brown draws a cartoon, and the two sometimes meet on the pitchers' mound.

It might be interesting to do a statistical analysis of which characters appear with which other ones, in what frequency. I'm not gonna do it, though.

I'm not sure, but this might be the first time we've seen a single 'Z' in a word balloon used to signify sleep. Later on Schulz has some fun with this convention, especially with giant, serif'd Zs.

July 27, 1953: Schroeder's On Fire

It is the summer months in the strip right now, making this feasible. I can't help but think that big hole overhead must affect the acoustics somehow.

One interesting thing about Peanuts' art style is how the characters' mouths disappear when closed. It's particularly evident on Schroeder's face here, since he doesn't speak in this strip.

When viewed from the front, the characters' mouths have generally been visible up until now, even if only as a short line. We'll see in the years to come that Schulz plays around with this a bit, that there will be times when characters seen from the front will strangely have no mouths.

July 20-21, 1953: Piano interlude

July 20


The first strip comments on the plight of the working artist.

July 21


The second, the artist's quest for respect.

It is easy to see the Schroeder strips as a metaphor for Schulz's own desire to be taken seriously. Maybe this is why he often uses Schroeder as an audience for Charlie Brown's efforts at cartooning, in which we can just as easily imagine Schulz poking fun at himself.

May 30, 1953: Look out, Schroeder!

I think we all know where this is heading....

How do you say hearts?

May 1, 1953: This is why I like Schroeder

It's odd, isn't it? Here Schroeder decries commercialism, and in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" CB spends a lot of the time complaining about the crassness of marketing culture. And yet no strip has been merchandised and exploited even close to the extent that Peanuts has. Income from Peanuts made Charles Schulz a billionaire.

April 23, 1953: Schroeder scoffs

One thing Schulz does, it seems to me, in the early days is repeat information unnecessarily. Schroeder's words in the last two panels are practically the same.

Here at Roasted Peanuts, we don't rest until we've dissected and bean-plated* each strip until all humor has been annihilated.

So, is there a way to have written this strip that could eliminate duplicating most of the text in the third panel? The obvious change, I suppose, would be to change Schroeder's words in either the third or last panel to something like "That's ridiculous!" Since the comedic point of the strip is Schroeder's lack of realization that (to spoil the joke completely) his playing Beethoven on his toy piano is just as ludicrous, it doesn't seem to me like anything is lost through this change.

This isn't meant to denigrate Charles Schulz's abilities as a writer. He was still developing at this point, but the comic itself is great. The fact that it does leave unstated the disconnect between Schroeder's statement and his actions, refusing to point to it outright and trusting the reader to make the observation himself, is a sign that he's already an excellent gag man. Most other comics would explicitly state the point of the joke and wreck the comedy almost as badly as I have, here, in explaining it.

* HI IM ON ROASTED PEANUTS AND I CAN OVERTHINK A PLATE OF BEANS

April 9, 1953: The Mystery of Schroeder's Piano

One thing about Peanuts is how it plays sometimes with the line between cartoonishness and reality. Between the two, it usually sticks pretty close to reality, at least in its physics, which makes the occasional launches into surreal logic, such as here, more effective. That's important. If crazy things happen all the time, the reader comes to expect them, and they have much less of an impact. Lots of webcomics get this wrong.

March 2, 1953: Treat Schroeder's piano with respect!

This is the first of a long-running theme of the strip, other characters not giving Schroeder's piano the respect it deserves. By the way, isn't that an evocative drawing of the ringing on Snoopy's ears? Just wide looping scribbles. Looking at them, I can practically hear it.

February 5, 1953: Schroeder the Alliterative Musician

Sometimes I think Schulz uses Schroeder as a way of subtly revealing his own artistic ambitions. It would have been funny to see Schroeder's opinion of American Idol.

January 27, 1953: The beginning of the courtship

Two days later, here's another important Schroeder strip; the first one between the familiar combatants, him and Lucy, on the familiar battlefield, at the piano, and with the familiar tone, Lucy's infatuation. The main thing missing is Schroeder's annoyance.

Schroeder could get very angry at Lucy later on, but so far no character has really gotten very angry at another. The worse we've seen is Violet throwing Charlie Brown out of her house, and so far, more times than not, they forget why she was angry before the end of the strip and invites him back in.

It's the calm before the storm.

Sunday, January 25, 1953: Schroeder at his zenith

This is a good example of a kind of Schroeder strip that never gets seen later on. It does a fine job of illustrating his personality. Schulz here presents the true Schroeder, not some dilettante doodler at the keyboard but a determined artist. In the classic age of the strip Schroeder is by far most often seen as a supporting character, setting off Lucy's monomania or Snoopy's whimsy. Here he trains alone, building himself up to be capable of performing the music he hears in his mind, determined to live up to his vision.

While we might can sympathize with the spurned Lucy's pleas for affection, and his maniacal worship of Beethoven is often played for laughs, Schroeder is generally an admirable character.

January 20, 1953: Snoopy and Schroeder

I think this is the first strip with just the two of them. Later on there are some memorable strips that pair the two that I, um, don't remember at this minute. Heh.

How large is Snoopy in the last panel? The more I look at it, the more he seems to be huge! We know the kids have to reach up to reach the door handle, and as this strip shows Snoopy is still pretty small relative to them. But sitting down in the last panel, his head come up most of the way to the door! Am I just seeing things?

January 13, 1953: Schroeder has standards

This is a rather funny strip; the turnabout in the last panel is pretty sharp. Again, for this one to work you have to know about Schroeder's music snobbery, which isn't information you can glean from this strip by itself. Of course now we all know about Schroeder and his peccadilloes, but Peanuts wasn't in a huge number of papers in those days.

December 9, 1952: It's the classics for Schroeder

It is worth reminding the reader that light piano jazz would become inseparable from the animated adaptations of Peanuts, so we must assume that Schroeder's not speaking on behalf of Charles Schulz in this strip.

October 13, 1952: Snoopy the Musician

This is one of the first strips in which a character actually shouts at another one, in larger letters. We've yet to see our first AUGH, though.

October 1, 1952: HA HA METAHUMOR

Peanuts has sometimes been taken seriously by folks, including Schulz himself, but there are moments like this every once in a while. There isn't really any connection, other than motive, between Schroeder's discovery and his remarkably knowledgeable comment. I can picture Schulz laughing at the idea of a character annoyed at being in a comic strip and looking for any excuse to work it in.

July 23, 1952: Schroeder vs. Accordions

In case you didn't notice it before, Schroeder hates accordions. We'll see before long that, by extension, this means accordion players.

It is easy to place this opinion as part of Schroeder's character, but is it just me or does this strip also imply that Schulz himself doesn't care for the instrument? Might he be subtly letting us know about his opinion of popular art? What does that say about his own burgeoning career in cartooning? Please write your opinions down in the form of an eight-page essay and bring it to class next week.

July 4, 1952: Snoopy and Schroeder

The two wordless wonders, together for the first time.

One thing about Peanuts that is right there in the open but is mentioned surprisingly rarely is how some characters never seem to interact with other ones. Schroeder and Linus don't have a lot of interactions. Neither do Lucy and Peppermint Patty (who calls her "Lucille"). Schroeder and Snoopy do have some interactions, but not as many as Schroeder and Lucy, who interact so often in the strip's heyday you could be forgiven for thinking Schroeder must be an imaginary friend of Lucy's.

Hey, is this the first "sigh?"